I am thinking of setting up a business website so I am doing an awful lot of reading and researching online. I have come across S.B.I and I am currently reading everything on their website, although I have not yet bought it. Although I am glad to have found this web page, I just don’t know what to think. The internet is such a minefield. My hubby has suggested that I initially set up a free hosting website just for the practice, before I can even think of making money with a proper webpage. I wondered if he actually has the right approach. In other words, just get used to running a web page first of all and then think about the more serious stuff later. (I do understand, of course, that just having a marvellous looking website is not the whole picture).
Thanks for your website. I am reading both yours and S.B.I’s.
I would be grateful for any help or advice anyone can give me here.

Cheers,
Susan (A newbie).
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Lorecee // Sep 20, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Hi Susan: it’s good that you and your husband learned some healthy skepticism right away about making money online. There are people on the Warrior Forum who have literally spent thousands of dollars on e-books and “programs” guaranteed to make them rich, and haven’t gotten anywhere.

At the same time, know that the best way to succeed at this is to commit, jump right in, and do it. For two reasons: first, because the beauty of the internet is that the cost of entry is so low that your actual sites are 60% of your market research; and second, because you’ll overcome your newbieness much faster if you take action while you’re studying.

I basically run each of my ideas through the metrics provided at Court and Mark’s Keyword Academy, and if the numbers add up, I throw up a site just to see what it will do. A Hostgator Baby account is $9.95 a month to host (publish) an unlimited number of domains. You also have to buy the actual domain, but you can get a .net domain at 1&1 for $5 for the first year during their sale this month. If the domain doesn’t make money, I use it for other purposes pertaining to backlinks. One hosting account for $120 a year plus 10 .net domains for $50 the first year is dirt cheap for starting a business.

Two years ago your husband would have been correct about using a free platform. And of course Grizzly’s Make Money Online for Beginners site is famous for ranking #3 for that term, which is one of the most competitive on the internet, using the free Blogger platform. But it took him at least two years to get there, and it would take him longer today. Google has been taking longer this year to index and rank Blogger blogs, and it takes more backlinks to push them to #1. The cautious mindset of “I won’t spend a dime on this until it makes me money” will hold you back by making it take longer to make money. Instead, get good instruction, do the work, and have faith that you’ll make the money back. I was making $100 a month two months after I started, which covered my expenses from the start. It’s not hard.

The reason I discourage people from using SBI is because each domain costs you $300 a year to host. You ARE going to get some things wrong at first in this business, and every time you change your domain at SBI, it costs you $50. If you want to run more than one site at a time, it costs from $150 to $300 per additional site. Their philosophy is to only have one site at first and make it your Magnum Opus. Mine is to have many sites, knowing that some will make it and some won’t, and the only way to find out is to actually put them up and see. Most of my colleagues start with Google’s Adsense program (NOT buying advertising, but rather earning a commission by publishing the ads on your site) because they allow us to focus on getting search engine traffic. Later, when you know how to get traffic, you can branch out into other, more complicated forms of monetization.

To make a long-winded story short, in your position I would join The Keyword Academy for the $1 for the first month special (it’s $67 a month after that if you decide to continue). Their method works and is white hat legit. If you’d like to “tip” me for sharing information on this blog, you can join via my affiliate links in this post or in the upper right corner of my site. I guarantee the information there will be worth $1 to you and then some.

Whatever you do, do it soon. On the net, you are losing money every day you sit around thinking about things instead of doing them–it moves that fast.

Thanks for visiting.

Lorecee